Tag Archives: countries

Will They, Won’t They?

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While Latvia is still arguing with the EU Commission over the spelling of eiro (or is it euro), the FT today asks the much more pertinent question: will the other baltic states even be able to join? On the backs of the energy hike Estonia and Lithuania are struggling to comply with the entry conditions, especially those on inflation. Slovenia is, however, expected to join on target on 1 January 2007.

Estonia, Lithuania and Slovenia set themselves the target of being in the first wave of new euro members next January and of complying with most of the rules, including public debt levels, interest rates and budget deficits.

Estonia, however, is struggling to meet the inflation criterion, which is likely to be set at about 3 per cent this year, 1.5 per cent above the average inflation rates of the three countries with the lowest inflation….. Like in other former Soviet-bloc countries, energy has a bigger weighting in Estonia’s consumer price index because the country uses power less efficiently than the EU’s older members.

“We feel that it’s a shame that just when we need to qualify for euro entry, the world oil prices go up,” said Kylike Sillaste, adviser to the prime minister….

Joaquin Almunia, the EU’s monetary affairs commissioner, has said he will apply strictly the entry standards for the candidate countries, although the ultimate decision on enlarging the eurozone lies with member states.

France 2005: the quest for greatness?

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It has now been a year and a half since I moved to France. I am not going to bore you with all the domestic challenges the move caused me, do not worry, but I need to mention this since I have only just begun to explore life in France. This post about France will therefore be rather impressionistic. Yet I am sure our esteemed guest poster Emmanuel, and hopefully our French readers, will chime in with corrections, elaborations and the like. I also need to mention that I live in the countryside of Brittany, which means there is some distance between me and whatever happens in Paris and the rest of France.

The first thing I noticed about France is that my day-to-day life has not changed much compared to my extended stay in Belgium. People basically talk about the same things: life is expensive, the weather is relatively mild for the time of the year, the bathroom needs painting, sports, etc. And naturally there has been some cultural talk, since I am a new kid on the block with a heavy foreign accent, mostly about culinary and linguistic differences. Every now and then the conversation turns to politics and society. Rarely so, but still.
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How anti-American are the French?

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Not as much as you might think, argues The Economist in a long, Christmas-special piece about French anti-Americanism (article freely available to non-subscribers) :

In one 2004 poll, 72% of the French had a favourable view of Americans, more even than in Britain (62%) or Spain (47%). Some 68% of those questioned in another poll the same year said that what unites France and America was more important than what separates them. During the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings in 2004, politicians were frosty, but the people at large showed an outpouring of gratitude to American veterans.

It’s true that there is a big gap between the view of the U.S. (pretty bad) and the view of the American people (quite good) in France, a sure sign that a substantial part of what is regarded as anti-Americanism is mainly driven by anti-Bushism.
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IMF Continues Debt Relief

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Today’s news is of course welcome news for everyone who cares about poverty in the third world, but going back to my Evo Morales post during the week, this policy will only really bring the benefits it could do if it is combined with a systematic drive to change the demographic profile of these countries, and this means, as well as writing-off debt, more expenditure on health and on education (and in particular on equality of opportunity female education). Really, what I think has been wrong with the IMF approach in the past has been a ‘one ring to fit them all’ policy. What we can see I think now is that this is inadequate: we need a two speed globalisation. One speed for the countries like Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Thailand etc, which are on the ramp and ready to take off, and another for those countries which need help with social spending (in order not to provoke an explosion in the political subsystem) while they get the demographic imbalances straighter. So we need a debt-pardoning-plus approach.

The International Monetary Fund’s board on Wednesday approved 100 per cent debt relief on $3.3bn owed to the fund by 19 of the world’s poorest countries.

In a statement issued after the board meeting, Rodrigo Rato, managing director, said: “This is an historic moment, which will allow these countries to increase spending in priority areas to reduce poverty, promote growth and to make progress towards achieving the millennium development goals.”

A Big Problem?

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Just a brief query: Can anyone think of the last time one of the big four countries in the EU — Germany, France, Britain, Italy — had a successful presidency of the Union?

It looks like the UK’s turn at the top will end without a budget agreement, which is fine for Blair’s domestic politics, but not so good for running the 25-country EU. Italy’s last run was marred by an initial spat between Berlusconi’s government and the European Parliament and never really got back into gear. Germany’s last presidency, back in ’99, featured the resignation of the Commission, the resignation of Germany’s finance minister and the war in Kosovo. The French presidency in 2000 ended with the summit in Nice, one of the least productive EU summits in memory. (EU mandarins from Central Europe still haven’t forgotten how Chirac gratuitously slighted them at Nice, setting the tone for his approach to enlargement.)

Breakthroughs seem to come during the presidencies of smaller countries. In recent years, think Ireland and Denmark. In the interests of better governance, maybe the Union should ban big countries from holding the presidency?

Wolfgang Lutz and the Low Fertility Trap

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Back in July I published a post about Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s hypothesis that those countries which sustain total fertility rates below 1.5 for any length of time may have fallen into a self-reinforcing low-fertility trap. Old Rottenhat (Ray to his friends) argued in comments that I had explained the reasons for the existence of low fertility but that I had not justified the idea that this was a ‘trap’. Old Rottenhat was right, and taking advantage of the fact that Lutz himself has now given a fuller outline of the hypothesis at the recent Postponement of Childbearing in Europe Conference (see presentation) I will now try and remedy this lacuna.

So here finally Ray, is your reply: I hope it is something which indeed goes beyond the obvious.
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The Postponement of Childbirth in Europe

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At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing population no longer replaces itself. This development in an of itself is no disaster – many countries arguably suffer from excessive rates of population increase – but equally reducing fertility too rapidly can lead to economic and social ‘imbalances’ that may well turn out to be, in and of themselves, ‘undesireable’.

Understanding why this is happening has begun to present an important challenge for many areas in contemporary social science as there are evidently factors involved in the process which embrace areas as diverse as demography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, economics and of course biology.

One of the characteristic features of this most recent fertility decline is that it is driven largely by a delay in childbearing: couples (and obviously in particular this means women) wait longer and longer before taking the decision to have a child. Understanding the dynamics behind this ‘delay syndrome’ is the key to developing a social policy to address the consequences, so it is particularly timely that the Vienna Institute of Demography was host last week to a Conference on this very topic: The Postponement of Childbearing In Europe. A number of interesting and important papers were presented, and I will be looking at a number of them between now and xmas. Indeed I have opened a page on my website which will be dedicated to the Conference.

But, just as a taster, why is postponment so important?
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Afghanistan, how art thou

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Dusty HeratDust. It’s everywhere. On your body, in your eyes, your hands never feel clean and clean clothes never stay like that for more than an hour. At night, visibility sometimes is less than 50 meters. And during the day, the city vanishes under a cloud of beige.
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Herat, Afghanistan, 4 years after.

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Nation building in failed states can be a little tricky, as not just a few political strategists are realising these days. With respect to Iraq, the deadly result of their misconceptions can be watched on the hour every hour. This, on the other hand, has, for better or worse, reduced the world’s attention devoted to Afghanistan, the other major construction site. Afghanistan is still a country worn and torn by decades of internal and external warfare, ethnic, religious strife, a country where traditional social structures and modernity clashed harshly, wether it was modernity disguised as Imperialism, Communism, or Islamism.
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Nordi-Flexi-Curity

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New Economist has been indulging himself (actually, truth be known he wants us to indulge him) with three posts on the Nordic Model (here, here and here).

Two things strike me. Firstly the fact that the UK presidency has been an absolute non-event (except for getting the Turkey negotiations started) since we were promised an ambitious programme of debate about precisely the topic of the EU social and economic model.

Secondly, as the last paper cited by New Economist makes clear:

The analysis also provides strong support for so-called absolute β-convergence among the Nordic countries. Thus, initial differences between the countries, in terms of real output per employee, real output per hour, and real wage per employee, slowly fade away over time. This finding tells us that the Nordic countries are not that different when it comes to saving rates, levels of the technology, and government policies.

Which means, of course, that these countries would have been ideal candidates for forming a currency union. Oh well, things that might have been! (Also it is perhaps worth making a mental note to check out more about that Nordic recession in the early 90s and what happened next).